FIG. 1 is a copy of a prior art screen image from a web mapping service that displays a mobile device user's present location and his/her surrounding streets. As shown in FIG. 1, a user's location 110 is denoted by a dot on the map of the display 100. The user's location 110 is shown relative to street 120 (e.g., 13th St NW) and point of interest 130 (e.g., McPherson Square Metro station) that are proximal to the user's location 110. In addition, criminal activity is indicated by dots 140 throughout the map. Crime mapping systems that display crimes as dots 140 may be effective to show all crime/traffic incidents as single events. Information about each incident, including the type of crime, day and time of incident, and street address, may be geo-located at a micro-level. However, overall crime patterns, descriptions/frequencies, and crime rates based on statistical street comparisons are not provided. Due to this shortcoming, users have to rely on their own judgment to find out which streets have large and small amounts of criminal activity. This subjective judgment does not bring accurate results pertaining to crime-related information. Thus, to provide more accurate and useful information regarding crime-related information, an enhanced system offering more various information and features (i.e., overall crime patterns, descriptions/frequencies, and crime rates) is required.
Furthermore, a mapping system with a ‘dot’ feature does not show accumulated crime/traffic incidents at the same place. In addition, such mapping system has difficulty in displaying large amount of location data onto a map. Such system would have difficulty clearly showing a number of crime points in areas with high crime density, especially when a map is zoomed out. In other words, the crime points would be lumped together as the individual dots blur, which would make finding out an exact point difficult.
Existing map services gather crime information and may also present shaded areas to represent crime statistics. FIG. 2 is a copy of a prior art screen image of a crime or traffic accident hot spot map having a color scheme that shows a graphical representation of criminal and traffic accidents risk on an aerial map, i.e., a so-called “heat map.” As shown on FIG. 2, display 200 illustrates, proximal to user's location 210, each point of crime data that fits in a smoothly tapered surface by calculating magnitudes per unit area 220, 230. Most providers of crime data do not release detail geolocation to protect privacy. To comply with the public regulations, law enforcement services provide crime data in one hundred block level of street addresses, wherein the last two digits of the address are hidden. E.g., 006XX E 89TH PL, Chicago, Ill. For this reason, geocoded points of the event on the maps would be inaccurate with where the event actually occurs. While such heat map presentation provides a user with the rough idea where crimes are occurring, this presentation does not associate the crime activity with particular street segments.
Further, a heat map provides a smoothly tapered surface that only shows high clustered crime and traffic accident approximate locations, and omits detailed location information for less reported incidents such as murder, rape, and kidnapping, even though these are severe, felony types of crime.
In addition, a heat map often misidentifies a low risk area as high risk area, and vice-versa, during data trimming and shading style algorithms. In addition, depending on the granularity of the shading styles, the crime rate may widely vary within a particular shaded area. In addition, within a particular shading style, the differences in crime types and rates are not effectively revealed. All types of crime are shaded as a color, no matter what crime types and rates are present. For instance, if a person should look for a place to live within a high crime area, which is typically colored as red, the shaded style map does not provide any detail and further information besides the red shade, nor any differences within the shaded area.
The heat map is also an inappropriate method for illustrating small areas, as the user zooms in his/her view of the map. The heat map only provides an overview of crime and traffic accident density at macro zoom levels.
Such prior art systems are presented in, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,289,171; 8,290,705; and 8,515,673, each of which is incorporated by reference herein.
What is needed is an interactive map that provides travel information by displaying street segments that should be avoided, because, for example, there has been a high rate of crime or accidents occurring thereon.